There are many aqueous based materials that must be applied to surfaces that are hydrophobic or water repelling surfaces. In order to form a uniform coating, especially by spinning or spin coating, an excess of the aqueous based material must be applied, and the excess then removed and discarded. Since in many applications, for example, in the application of a top anti-reflective coating (TARC) to a photoresist layer formed on a semiconductor substrate or wafer, the amount of discarded material is very many times the amount of material in the finished coating and thus the wastage and resultant cost is very high. Therefore, there is a need for a method to reduce the amount of material required to form a uniform layer on a hydrophobic surface.